The Socratic Shrink

By Daniel Duane

Published: March 21, 2004

On a recent Manhattan morning, with a cold wind slashing off New York Harbor, Lou Marinoff took the granite steps of the federal courthouse two at a time -- brown eyes fierce, ivory white skin offsetting his dark beard, a Russian fur hat making him the very picture of the engaged intellectual. A tenured philosophy professor at City College of New York and the author of ''The Big Questions: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life'' and of the international best seller ''Plato, Not Prozac! Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems,'' Marinoff is the world's most successful marketer of philosophical counseling. A controversial new talk therapy, philosophical counseling takes the premise that many of our problems stem from uncertainties about the meaning of life and from faulty logic.

Passing through courthouse security, Marinoff placed his World Economic Forum tote bag in the metal detector -- swag from his annual gig in Davos, Switzerland, and filled that morning with documents for Marinoff's lawsuit against his own employer. Claiming a violation of his freedom of speech, the case stems from a C.C.N.Y. moratorium on Marinoff's campus counseling, instituted while administrators looked into liability questions. What if a philosopher with zero mental health training, they worry, fails to recognize a student's suicidal tendencies and prescribes Heidegger instead of psychiatric intervention? The moratorium is no longer officially in effect, but Marinoff is suing for lost income and professional opportunities, and C.C.N.Y. attorneys have also laid out insurance requirements that Marinoff finds utterly offensive: ''We have never, not ever, had a single case in which philosophical counseling caused psychological harm,'' he said in the courthouse elevator. ''These people just can't tell the difference between psychology and philosophy. That's how badly educated people are these days.''

The lawsuit is only one of several fronts in Marinoff's crusade to make philosophical counseling a mainstream profession, and to make himself its public face. His message, spoken in a defensive staccato, goes like this: Americans are tired of psychologists dwelling on our every painful feeling, we're sick of psychiatrists prescribing a new drug every time we feel confused and many of our most pressing problems aren't even emotional or chemical to begin with -- they're philosophical. To wit: You don't have to be clinically depressed or burdened by childhood guilt to want help with the timeless questions of the human condition -- the persistence of suffering and the inevitability of death, the need for a reliable ethics. ''Even sane, functional people need principles to live by,'' Marinoff told me, his voice lowering without slowing in the sun-flooded courtroom, ''so we are offering what Socrates called the examined life, the chance to sit with a philosopher and ask what you really believe and make sure it's working for you.''

Regardless of C.C.N.Y.'s unease about philosophical counseling, the public appears ready and eager for at least some form of philosophy in the daily diet. Witness Tom Morris, a former Notre Dame professor, charging the likes of I.B.M. and General Electric up to $30,000 an hour for his lecture on the ''7 C's of Success,'' distilled from Cicero and Spinoza, Montaigne and Aeschylus. Christopher Phillips, author of ''Six Questions of Socrates'' (just out from W. W. Norton), has been traveling the country engaging spontaneous crowds in Socratic dialogue about the nature of justice and the meaning of courage. And ''Philosophy Talk,'' a new San Francisco-based radio show modeled on NPR's ''Car Talk,'' offers two wisecracking Stanford professors -- and their many call-in guests -- tackling thorny matters like ''Is Lying Always Bad?'' and ''Would You Want to Live Forever?''

As for philosophical counseling, in which the philosopher serves as a kind of life coach/bodhisattva, the practice does have a toehold in Europe, Israel, South Africa, India and especially the U.K., where Alain de Botton's 2000 best seller, ''The Consolations of Philosophy,'' became a six-part television series. Marinoff wasn't the first to try philosophical counseling in the United States, but he's way ahead of the pack when it comes to building the institutions of legitimacy and seeking access to the river of money known as health-insurance reimbursement.

Like any entrepreneur cornering a new market, Marinoff has worked fast and furiously, sometimes bruising competitors along the way. In short order, he has established the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (A.P.P.A.), started a series of three-day counselor-certification weekends and begun setting up an academic journal. Before those pesky lawyers got involved, he was even performing research on human volunteers at C.C.N.Y. and arranging for a New York foundation to finance free philosophical counseling through the C.C.N.Y. campus wellness center.

Marinoff does have his fans - Vaughana Feary, a New Jersey-based practitioner and A.P.P.A. board member, says that Marinoff's books bring her a steady stream of would-be clients. But to many of the other philosophical counselors in this country -- and to quite a few overseas -- Marinoff may be the worst thing ever to happen to their fledgling field. Shlomit Schuster, an Israeli practitioner, calls ''Mr. Marinoff's overpopularizing presentation a worldwide embarrassment for the profession,'' and David O'Donaghue, a licensed psychologist with a doctoral background in philosophy, says that Marinoff ''is not a scholar, he's not a guy who should be leading a country'' in philosophical counseling. ''This is an infant field, and we're all asking questions.'' O'Donaghue says that he considers Marinoff's three-day certification efforts ''ludicrous'' and that ''the psychologists are laughing at us!'' Marinoff's strongest competition, in fact, comes from the American Society for Philosophy Counseling and Psychotherapy (A.S.P.C.P.), which is devoted to precisely the opposite tack -- seeking bridges to the established professions. According to Elliot D. Cohen, one of the society's executive directors, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Brown University and is a certified practitioner of rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT), a common form of talk therapy, ''The biggest obstacle to philosophical counseling's growth in the U.S. is its acceptance by the established mental health fields, because we're the newest kid on the block. And what are people in those fields saying now? With Marinoff certifying people who have no clinical training? They're saying, 'Philosophers don't know anything about mental health, and they're going to serve as an endangerment to clients.'''